TikTok and Bumble are the latest tech companies to join an initiative aimed at reducing the spread of revenge porn — intimate images and videos shared without the subject's consent. They've partnered with StopNCII.org (Stop Non-Consensual Intimate Image Abuse), which hosts a tool developed in partnership with Meta. TikTok, Bumble, Facebook and Instagram will detect and block any images that are included in StopNCII.org's bank of hashes.

The website enables people to create hashes (unique digital fingerprints) of images and videos in question. This process takes place on their device. In order to protect users' privacy, the actual files aren't uploaded to StopNCII.org, only a unique string of letters and numbers.

Hashes submitted to StopNCII.org are shared with the initiative's partners. If an image or video uploaded to TikTok, Bumble, Facebook or Instagram matches a corresponding hash and "meets partner policy requirements," the file will be sent to the platform's moderation team. If moderators find that the image breaks their platform's rules, they'll remove it. The other partner platforms will block the image from being shared too.

The tool has been live for a year and more than 12,000 people have created cases to prevent intimate videos and images being shared without consent. Users have created more than 40,000 hashes to date. As Bloomberg notes, Meta partnered with SWGfL, the UK nonprofit behind the Revenge Porn Helpline, to develop StopNCII.org. SWGfL hopes that many more platforms will sign up.

The initiative builds on a pilot Meta (then known as Facebook) started in Australia in 2017 that asked users to upload revenge porn images to a Messenger chat with themselves. Meta promised to delete the images after hashing them, but the approach raised obvious privacy concerns.

TikTok and Bumble are joining the initiative amid increasing regulatory scrutiny on the former and a broader crackdown on revenge porn. The UK, for instance, plans to force platforms that host user-generated content to take down non-consensual intimate images more swiftly, as laid out in the government's Online Safety Bill.

Cadillac Racing says its first electric race car is almost ready for the 24 Hours of Daytona event in January after passing critical testing and development milestones. Since July, the V-LMDh has gone through nearly 12,000 miles (19,000 km) of on-track testing, including a 24-hour test at Sebring International Raceway.

Cadillac collected data on nighttime operation and durability on the bumpy 3.7-mile circuit. Program manager Laura Wontrop Klauser claimed Sebring was the perfect testing ground for the V-LMDh ahead of its competitive debut at Daytona. “To complete that endurance test was extra motivation for our team and provided a sense of accomplishment,” Klauser said in a statement. “We still have a lot to do in a short time, but we are at the point where we are fine-tuning many things.”

The car is also slated to take part in the 24-hour race at Le Mans in June. Cadillac plans to run it in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and the FIA World Endurance Championship. A final test will take place next week at Daytona as part of mandatory evaluations for all manufacturers intending to take part in the IMSA’s new Grand Touring Prototype class. Cadillac Racing will reveal the final competition version of the three V-LMDh race cars, including liveries (and hopefully a new name), in mid-January.

Geoff Keighley and his team might be focused on The Game Awards, but they're also looking ahead to their next gaming event. The fourth edition of Summer Game Fest's live kickoff show, which will have a live audience for the first time, will take place on June 8th. 

Keighley was involved with E3 for 25 years, though he backed out in early 2020 (before the Entertainment Software Association canceled that year's edition). Three years later, the two events are set to go toe-to-toe.

The long-running expo hasn't held an in-person event since 2019. The 2020 and 2022 editions of E3 were called off, though it went ahead as an online-only event in 2021. E3's partner showcases start on June 11th with the in-person component of the show (which PAX operator ReedPop will run) slated for June 13th to 16th.

The Summer Game Fest showcase will take place at the 6,000-capacity YouTube Theater, a 20-minute drive from E3's Los Angeles Convention Center home base. As ever, the former will feature world premieres, gameplay demos and other announcements. Unless you want to attend Summer Game Fest in person, you won't need to buy a ticket as you can watch the event live on the likes of YouTube and Twitch. It's not yet clear if publishers and studios will offer hands-on demos, as is the case at E3.

The largest radio telescope in the southern hemisphere has joined the search for technosignatures, signals that indicate the presence of technology developed by extraterrestrial intelligence. A new instrument utilized by the MeerKAT radio telescope, which is in a remote region of South Africa, will increase the number of targets that Breakthrough Listen can observe by a factor of 1,000.

A team of engineers and astronomers involved with Listen, an initiative that's seeking signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life, spent three years working on the instrument, which is said to be the most powerful equipment ever deployed to aid the search for technosignatures. The instrument is integrated with MeerKAT's control and monitoring systems.

Listen is already employing the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, the Parkes Telescope in Australia and others in its hunt for technosignatures. What's different about MeerKAT is that there's no need to physically move its antennas. Its 64 dishes can monitor an area of the sky 50 times larger than what GBT can view at once.

“Such a large field of view typically contains many stars that are interesting technosignature targets," Listen principal investigator Dr. Andrew Siemion said in a statement. "Our new supercomputer enables us to combine signals from the 64 dishes to get high resolution scans of these targets with excellent sensitivity, all without impacting the research of other astronomers who are using the array.”

Along with being able to monitor a larger area of the sky at a given time, the ability to scan 64 objects at once will help Listen to detect and dismiss interfering signals from spacecraft launched by humans, such as satellites. One of the first targets that the new instrument will observe is Alpha Centauri. In 2020, Listen detected an odd radio signal coming from Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun and a member of the Alpha Centauri system.

“It will take us just two years to search over one million nearby stars," Listen project scientist Dr. Cherry Ng said. "MeerKAT will provide us with the ability to detect a transmitter akin to Earth’s brightest radio beacons out to a distance of 250 light years in our routine observing mode.”

Microsoft has revealed its first wave of Game Pass additions for December and the headliner is a major game that debuted earlier this year — Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. You'll be able to play through all nine core films in the Star Wars franchise and you can choose which trilogy to begin with. It's maybe the best Star Wars game I've played. It's gorgeous, the gameplay is a blast and it's very funny, with clever twists on many of the series' most memorable moments. It's coming to Game Pass on December 6th and you can play it on Xbox, PC and Xbox Cloud Gaming.

A few games have joined Game Pass today, including Eastward, a charming indie RPG that debuted last year. It has a lovely art style that takes inspiration from Earthbound. Both that and The Walking Dead: The Final Season are now available on Game Pass via console, PC and the cloud. Also hitting PC Game Pass today is Totally Reliable Delivery Service, a ragdoll physics game about terrible package couriers.

Looking further ahead, Hello Neighbor 2 (console, PC and cloud) will hit Game Pass on December 6th, followed by Chained Echoes (all three platforms) two days later. An Xbox One version of Metal: Hellsinger will be available on Game Pass on December 8th too — subscribers can already access it on Series X/S, PC and the cloud.

One of the last big Xbox exclusives of the year, High On Life, will arrive on Game Pass on December 13th. The sci-fi first-person shooter from Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland is coming to console, PC and cloud gaming. "Alchemist simulator" Potion Craft will be available on console and PC via Game Pass on the same day. On December 15th, subscribers can check out Hot Wheels Unleashed – Game of the Year Edition (which I've heard great things about) and puzzle-platformer Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan on console, PC and Xbox Cloud Gaming at no extra cost.

On the other side of the coin, several games are leaving Game Pass on December 15th, so you have a couple more weeks to check them out before you'd need to buy them (though you'll get a 20 percent discount if you're a Game Pass subscriber). The titles that will soon depart the library are:

• Aliens: Fireteam Elite (cloud, console and PC)

• Breathedge (cloud, console and PC)

• Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age (cloud, console and PC)

• Firewatch (cloud, console and PC)

• Lake (cloud, console and PC)

• One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 (cloud, console and PC)

• Neoverse (cloud and console)

• Race with Ryan (cloud, console and PC)

• Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth (cloud, console and PC)

• Rory McIlroy PGA Tour (console) 

• Transformers: Battlegrounds (cloud, console and PC)

Disney researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that seemingly makes it far easier to make an actor appear younger or older in a scene. While artists will still be able to make manual adjustments to make sure the effect looks as realistic as possible, the AI tool could take care of most of the heavy lifting. It's said to take the AI just five seconds to apply the aging effects to a single frame.

Re-aging an actor is typically an expensive and laborious process that requires artists to go through a scene frame-by-frame to manually change the character's appearance. Attempts have been made in the past to automate the process with neural networks and machine learning. Disney's researchers note that, while they might work well for still images, other systems "typically suffer from facial identity loss, poor resolution and unstable results across subsequent video frames." They claim their solution offers "the first practical, fully-automatic and production-ready method for re-aging faces in video images."

The team wrote in a paper that it would be impossible to train the FRAN (face re-aging network) neural network on a dataset of real people. That would require pairs of images showing a subject with the same facial expression, pose, lighting and background at two different and known ages. Instead, the researchers created a database of several thousand randomly generated faces. They re-aged those synthetic faces using existing machine learning aging tools, then fed the results of that process into FRAN.

The neural network can analyze a headshot and predict which parts of a face would be affected by aging and then it applies effects like wrinkles or skin smoothing as a layer on top of the original face. As Gizmodo notes, the researchers claim this approach allows FRAN to re-age the performer with their identity and appearance intact, even when their head or face is moving around or the lighting changes in a shot. Unlike with other methods, FRAN doesn't require an extra face alignment step either.

There are many good reasons why Disney would want to develop such a tool. It could lessen visual effects artists' workloads and speed up the process, for one thing. In addition to helping productions without blockbuster budgets age their actors up or down, it might help keep ballooning budgets in check. A significant chunk of The Irishman's budget, which reports suggest was as much as $200 million, went toward making Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci look younger.

Disney has been de-aging performers in its own projects, notably with Mark Hamill in Star Wars. When Harrison Ford returns as Indiana Jones next summer, he'll also look a little younger than you're used to seeing him — at least for the opening sequence. Disney's new re-aging tool should make it faster for effects artists to take years off such performers' faces in the future.

YouTube has revealed its top videos and creators of 2022. At the top of the US trending video list is the final video from Technoblade, a Minecraft creator who died after a battle with cancer. Technoblade wrote a farewell message to fans that his father read in the video, which has more than 87.6 million views.

In second place is The Guardian's uncensored version of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock during the Oscars ceremony, which has 103 million total views. Another popular Minecraft creator, Dream, revealed his face for the first time in a video that racked up 47 million views. The list also includes the Super Bowl LVI halftime show, the culmination of Mark Rober's anti-porch pirate glitterbomb series and that Try Guys mess.

The trending video list is based on US video views, which explains why MrBeast's recreation (and giveaway) of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory is in fifth place despite having 126 million total views. YouTube also excludes Shorts, music videos, trailers and children's videos from this list.

Speaking of MrBeast, he was the top creator based on the number of subscribers gained in the US. That's not too surprising, since he has the most subscribers of any individual creator (Indian music label T-Series has the most overall). YouTube says that list doesn't take into account artists, brands, media companies or children's content.

Elsewhere, YouTube revealed the top songs in the US for 2022 (featuring tracks released this year or older ones that saw a significant uptick in views). "We Don't Talk About Bruno" from Disney's Encanto topped the list with 503 million views. Bad Bunny and Karol G each had two songs on the list.

When the original Uncharted game debuted in 2007, an IGN reviewer called it a "rollercoaster adventure." Fast forward 16 years and you'll be able to experience Uncharted as a literal thrill ride at a theme park. Spanish resort PortAventura World has signed a deal with Sony to build a rollercoaster based on the Uncharted movie, which is an adaptation of Naughty Dog's games. The ride is slated to open at the theme park, which is around an hour and a half away from Barcelona, in mid-2023.

The rollercoaster will take the park's visitors on "a dangerous search for one of the greatest treasures ever found," PortAventura said. With a budget of over €25 million ($25.7 million) behind it, the Uncharted ride will have an immersive pre-show that's said to be full of surprises. The rollercoaster will be almost 700 meters long and reach a height of over 12 meters. At least some parts of the so-called dark ride will be enclosed, and likely feature animations or video projections, special effects and Nathan Drake saying "No, no, no!" way too many times.

Although it had a lukewarm reaction from critics, Uncharted performed fairly well at the box office, pulling in just under $402 million to become the fifth highest-grossing film based on a video game. Sony is turning many of its other PlayStation properties into movies and TV shows, including The Last of Us, Horizon, God of War and Ghost of Tsushima. Perhaps some of those will end up becoming theme park rides too — though a Last of Us rollercoaster might be a little too thrilling for some folks.

DoorDash says it is laying off around 1,250 employees in the latest instance of belt tightening at a well-known tech company. CEO Tony Xu wrote in a note to employees that DoorDash sped up hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic to catch up with its growth, since the company was actually undersized as of early 2020. Most of DoorDash's investments are said to be paying off. However, Xu noted that "while we’ve always been disciplined in how we have managed our business and operational metrics, we were not as rigorous as we should have been in managing our team growth. That’s on me. As a result, operating expenses grew quickly."

Xu added that DoorDash has "been more resilient than other ecommerce companies." Third-party data suggests that the company increased its share of the food delivery market to 56 percent of sales as of September. However, DoorDash is still vulnerable to external factors, such as rising interest rates and the threat of a recession.

The company's growth has slowed and Xu said if DoorDash didn't cut costs, its operating expenses would outpace its revenue. The layoffs will account for around six percent of DoorDash's workforce, according to Bloomberg.

DoorDash's severance package will include 17 weeks of pay along with a February 2023 stock vest for those who are eligible. Health benefits will run through the end of March and COBRA coverage will remain available for up to 18 months. Xu noted that DoorDash will set March 1st as the employment termination date to give immigrant workers who are in the US on visas more time to find another job. Moreover, DoorDash says it will offer recruiting support.

Lyft, another major player in the gig economy space, said earlier this month it would lay off 13 percent (nearly 700) of its employees. Other notable tech companies have conducted mass layoffs in recent months, including Meta, Twitter, Amazon, Roku, Snap, Patreon and Peloton.

Two months after its chaotic launch, Overwatch 2 is in a much healthier place and Blizzard is gearing up for the game's second season. A gameplay trailer for the season, which starts on December 6th and will introduce another new tank character, provides a glimpse of an upcoming limited-time mode. It's called Battle for Olympus and it will run from January 5th until January 19th.

Blizzard only offered a brief look at Battle for Olympus in the trailer, but it takes place on a revamped version of the Ilios map and shows Roadhog firing rocks (instead of his usual scrap) and Junker Queen raining lightning down onto the battlefield. To wit, Blizzard says heroes will be "imbued with awesome god-like powers" in this mode.

Speaking of Junker Queen, the tank who joined the lineup when Overwatch 2 launched, she's the recipient of a mythic skin in season two, which (perhaps unsurprisingly) has a Greek mythology theme. The Zeus look has customizable parts and new weapon models, voice lines and special effects. That rad skin is the reward for reaching level 80 of the next battle pass.

The Winter Wonderland and Lunar New Year events will return during the season as well, and they'll feature fresh skins. During last month's Halloween event, there was no way for players to earn new event skins for free, which led to a backlash from players. However, Blizzard has said that, starting in season two, every event will have a skin that fans can unlock by simply playing the game — just like they could in the Overwatch 1 days.

The trailer also offered a look at the new escort map for season two, Shambali Monastery, where Zenyatta and the latest tank hero, Ramattra, used to live (a deeper dive into the map is coming later this week). Ramattra is the game's first so-called "tempo" tank. He can change forms and gain access to alternate abilities. He's all about closing the gap between his team and the enemy. Ramattra will initially be gated behind the season two battle pass. Buying the premium battle pass will unlock him instantly, but you'll need to grind through the ranks to claim him for free.

Elsewhere, Blizzard will rotate the map selection for the core game modes. Two maps, Oasis and Nepal, will be playable at different times of day. Balance changes for some heroes are on the way and those who miss out on unlocking Sojourn, Junker Queen and Kiriko in season one will be able to add them to their roster by winning a certain number of games.